Divers have found five more bodies in the wreckage of the Costa Concordia which ran aground and sank on January 13, 2012 off the island of Giglio, Italy. The presumed death toll remains at 32, with only two of the roughly 4,200 passengers and crew still missing. Salvage of the ship is expected to take close to a year.
If HMS Hermione, commissioned in 1783, became a symbol of Royal Navy cruelty and bloody mutiny, the French light frigate l’ Hermione, commissioned in 1779, would become a symbol of American independence. On March 21, 1780, the 23 year old Gilbert du Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette, stepped aboard l’ Hermione to sail back to America with the then secret news that France was committing 5,500 men and five frigates to help George Washington and his forces. With this new French aid and the assistance of the young Major General Lafayette, the Continental forces under General Washington would defeat the British General Cornwallis at Yorktown eighteen months later, effectively winning independence from Great Britain.
Now l’ Hermione, “freedom’s frigate,” has been reborn in the Charente-Maritime in Rochefort, France where the original ship was built. The new frigate has been under construction since 1997 and preparations are now being made for its launch. More than three million visitors have watched the construction of the replica frigate. When completed, there are plans to sail the ship to Boston, reenacting the fateful voyage carrying the Marquis de Lafayette. The video below is a light-hearted tour and inspection of the new frigate nearing completion.
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Thanks to Frank Hanavan and Alaric Bond for pointing out l’ Hermione.
There were two frigates, both named Hermione, both launched within a few years of each other. The British HMS Hermione would become a symbol of cruelty and bloody mutiny, whereas the French Hermione would carry the young Gilbert Motier, better known as the Marquis de Lafayette on a crucial voyage to assist a rebellion against the English Crown in its North American colonies. Neither ship has been forgotten. The mutiny on the HMS Hermoine has become a fixture in nautical fiction, whereas the French Hermione is being reborn in a shipyard in Rochefort sur mer.
The British frigate, HMS Hermione was commissioned in 1783 as 32-gun fifth-rate frigate. Five captains served competently on her quarterdeck until in in February 1797 — the year of the Spithead and Nore mutinies — Captain Hugh Pigot was given command. Within a year, HMS Hermoine was the scene of the bloodiest mutiny in British history. The excellent video by Maritime Great Britain tells the tale:
1797 – Mutiny Aboard HMS Hermione
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Thanks to Dexter Donham for pointing out this trailer for Vanishing Sail, a documentary still under production and expected to be out in 2013. Filmed in the Grenadines, Vanishing Sail looks at the sailing vessels that once were both the lifeblood of Caribbean commerce. From their website: Mixed with rare archive footage and interviews with the last old Caribbean sea captains, the documentary combines dramatic sailing scenes with narration and an original soundtrack to tell the story of trading by sail in the West Indies and it’s legacy in the islands today.
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The twenty eight year old bulk carrier Oriental Nicety was recently sold for scrap for $16 million. The ship was originally a tanker and has four owners and as many names. She is best known as the Exxon Valdez, the single hull tanker that ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, spilling more than 36,000 long tons of crude oil. It was the worst domestic maritime oil spill prior to the BP Deepwater Horizon rig disaster of 2010 which spilled over 560,000 tons of oil.
Winnie Breegle WAVE Code Talker
Earlier this month, 90 year old Winnie Breegle spoke at the 2012 Women’s History Month celebration at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, FL. She had quite a story to tell. Not only was she a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) in World War II but she was also a “code talker,” trained to understand Navajo code as a cryptographer.
In World War II, the code talkers were largely a group of more than 400 Marines who were bilingual Navajo speakers. By using a spoken Navajo code, they were able to dramatically speed up communications while being undecipherable to the Japanese. Most code talkers were Navajo, but as there were too few Navajo speakers, a program was set up to train WAVES to understand the code talkers. Winnie Breegle was one of the WAVES to become a code talker.
WWII WAVE, Code Talker, Keynote Speaker at NSWC PCD Women’s History Month
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We posted previously about “Pirates and Privateers,” a documentary on CBC’s Land and Sea. The 20 minute documentary is now available on-line. It presents a distinctive view of piracy and privateering from the perspective of the Canadian Maritimes, not often seen by those of us to the South. Well worth the time to watch.
Photo of damage to the container ship bridge taken by passenger Andrew lock
The luxury cruise ship Silver Shadow may have lived up to its name on Friday morning when it collided with a container ship in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. There were no reported injuries on the cruise ship, though passengers reported being knocked off their feet. The Silver Shadow’s bow damaged the bridge of the Vietnamese container ship. Silver Shadow is owned and operated by Silverseas Cruises.
In 1956, the passenger ships, Andrea Doria and the Stockholm collided in dense fog off Nantucket. Both vessels were equipped with radar and radios. The collision and subsequent sinking of the Andrea Doria is often referred to as a “radar assisted casualty.” It appears that after fifty six years, nothing has necessarily changed. Fortunately, in the case of the Silver Shadow there were no reported injuries among the passengers. There is currently no information on possible injuries to the crew of the container ship.
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Photo: Mark Thiessen/National Geographic
James Cameron wants to dive to deepest part of the ocean – the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 35,800 feet (5.8 nautical miles) below the surface. To do so, he plans on using a single person submersible designed to dive straight down, described as a vertical torpedo. The experimental craft, built in secrecy in Australia over eight years, also rotates on a vertical axis like a bullet fired from a rifle (although much more slowly) as it dives. The intent is to minimize the dive time so as to maximize the time on the bottom. It sounds like a great idea, provided Cameron can bring the sub to a stop at the appropriate moment.
Alan Villiers was the great chronicler of the last days of sail. In 1918, at the age of 15, he left home in Melborne, Australia to go to sea. His first love would always be the full rigged sailing ships that he had watched a boy sailing in and out of Melbourne. Over the next sixty years, until his death in 1982, he would sail the world’s oceans in square-rigged ships and write twenty five books and numerous articles, most about the last days of the great windjammers.
Villiers also took many remarkable photographs. Thanks to Captain Richard Bailey for pointing out this Collection of Photographs by Alan Villiers, which features hand-colored photographs from ships Villiers sailed, as a well as a succinct biography of Villers’ remarkable career. Britain’s National Maritime Museum has posted additional photos: The Last of the Tall Ships: Photographs by Alan Villiers.
More photos after the jump.
In 1904 and 1905, archaeologists Haakon Shetelig and Gabriel Gustafson excavated a burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg in Vestfold county, Norway that contained a well-preserved Viking ship. The Osberg ship was reconstructed and has became Norway’s largest tourist attraction.
The New Oseberg Ship Foundation is now building a replica of the 9th century ship, which it hopes to launch this summer. One critical question remained, however, before construction could begin. Was the almost 22 meter ship actually a seaworthy design or merely a funerary decoration? A previous copy, built twenty years ago, capsized and sank almost immediately. Recent analysis suggests that the rebuilding of the original ship may have introduced errors which impacted the seaworthiness of the subsequent replica. The video, below, looks at the history of the Osberg ship and the engineering and model testing of the design of the new replica, now under construction.
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Coelacanths apparently evolved in their current form around 400 million years ago. They were thought to have gone extinct 65 million years ago, during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction – that is, until 1938 when a fisherman in South Africa pulled one up in his nets. Not surprisingly, they are often referred to as “living fossils.” Since their discovery off South Africa, they have also been found in the waters off the Comoros, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar. In 1999, coelacanths were also found in the waters of Indonesia off Sulawesi.
Now German scientists have found something else quite remarkable about these rare fish. After a twenty year study they have determined that coelacanths can live up to a hundred years and possibly even longer. This would make the coelacanth not only one of the world’s oldest fish species, but possibly also the longest-lived. Thanks to coelacanth savant and prodigious polymath, Allan Janus for pointing out the article.
Photo: Wally Skalij, Los Angeles Times
Way back in 1984, I worked for Malcom McLean’s United States Lines, when the 4,400 TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) containership, the American New York, was delivered. She was this first of McLean’s fleet of “Jumbo Econships.” In those days, he was criticized for building ships that were too big for most ports to handle. I am reminded of this by the arrival of the 12,565 TEU containership, MSC Fabiola, in the Port of Long Beach last Friday. She is the largest container ship ever to call on a US port.
Mammoth cargo ship arrives at Port of Long Beach
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In November, we posted about how a drought on the Rhine River was exposing unexploded World War II munitions, and then in December about the evacuation of half of the German city of Koblenz, when several large bombs were found buried in the riverbank.
This morning, we understand that officials are evacuating 1,000 residents in an area near the French Mediterranean port of Marseille in order to remove a one ton German bomb dating from WWII which was uncovered last week by construction workers.
This is only the most recent unexploded WWII bomb discovered in Marseille. In December, a 250 kilogram American bomb, apparently dropped on the occupying Germans, was also discovered and defused near the old port.
Marseille clears port to remove 1-ton World War II-era bomb left by Germans
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The US Navy wants to install a $100 million offshore training range, which would include an undersea array of cables and sensors for training warships, submarines and aircraft about 50 miles off the Atlantic coast of southern Georgia and northern Florida. Environmentalists are seeking to block the project, saying it’s too close to waters where North Atlantic right whales migrate near shore each winter to birth their calves. Right whales are highly endangered. Only about 400 North Atlantic right whales remain. A Federal judge is being asked to rule on the lawsuit filed against the Navy by a dozen conservation groups.
Judge Hears Case Involving Navy, Rare Right Whales
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Two years and one month ago today, the SV Concordia, a school ship operated by West Island College International, was knocked down and sank off the coast of Brazil. Fortunately, all 64 passengers and crew aboard were rescued. The final report of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, issued in October of last year, concluded that poor training and operator error contributed to the sinking. Thanks to Wojtek ‘Voytec’ Wacowski, on Facebook, for pointing out the anniversary.
Jarle Andhøy
Norwegian Jarle Andhøy, 34, who calls himself a “Wild Viking,” is in trouble again. Andhøy and two others are sailing the 54-foot yacht, Nilaya, off Antarctica. They have reported that the yacht has a broken boom and that they are heading for an unspecified Argentine Antarctic base to carry out emergency repairs and to refuel. Andhøy sailed to Antarctica without permits and is currently wanted by New Zealand authorities. Andhøy is also reported to be sailing without an EPRIB.
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Tracking Pirate Tweets
At first this sounded like a joke. Pirates like to tweet, have blogs and are on Facebook. Really?
According to security expert, Jessica Lincoln, director of intelligence at Rubicon Resolution, “Somalia is a very sophisticated economy, it has one of the best mobile phone communication systems in the world.” By tracking tweets, Facebook entries and other social media, security experts working for shipping companies can piece together news and relationships in the pirate community and in organizations like al-Qaeda’s Somali affiliate Al-Shabaab. Not surprisingly for the Internet, some care is required, however. “Actually getting verified information from within Somalia is very difficult, because anybody can tweet, anybody can post anything,” Lincoln said.
#Pirate? Tracking modern buccaneers through Twitter
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This week we posted that the Pacific nation of Kiribati is considering purchasing land on Fiji as a possible site to relocate as rising waters threaten to submerge their home islands. As distant and exotic as Kiribati’s problem may sound an article in the New York Times brings it all a bit closer to home. Whereas roughly 100,000 residents of Kiribati are threatened by rising water, “about 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.” One scientist referred to it as an “invisible tsunami.”
Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.
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The ship’s bell on the Costa Concordia has gone missing. According to Reuters, “underwater thieves have evaded an array of laser systems that measure millimetric shifts in the Costa Concordia shipwreck and 24-hour surveillance by the Italian coast guard and police to haul off a symbolic booty – the ship’s bell…. Judicial sources said on Thursday thieves nabbed the ship’s bell more than two weeks ago from one of the decks of the Costa Concordia, which is submerged in 8 metres (26 feet) of water.”
Reuters also reports that Peter Berdowski, CEO of the Dutch dredging and maritime services company, Boskalis, says that the cost of refloating the Costa Concordia intact from the ledge where the ship is now perched off the island of Giglio, will cost “far beyond 100 million” Euros. The ship was delivered in 2006 at a cost of €450 million. Boskalis is one of six companies bidding on the salvage of the sunken cruise ship. Thanks to Phil Leon for contributing to this post.